News tagged with planetary body

(PhysOrg.com) -- Though generally thought to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid Vesta is expected to be so cold and to receive so little sunlight that water ice could have survived there for billions of years, ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA has successfully completed a series of autonomous "drop" tests of a robotic lander test article - in a record 10 months - to demonstrate the ability to perform a controlled landing on the moon or other ...

Just as remotely-operated vehicles help humans explore the depths of the ocean from above, NASA has begun studying how a similar approach may one day help astronauts explore other worlds. On June 17 and July 26, NASA tested ...

(Phys.org)—Even comparatively small meteorite impact craters may have played a key role in the origin and evolution of early life on Earth, according to a researcher at The University of Western Australia.

Robotic exploration to remote regions, to include distant planetary bodies, is often limited by energy requirements to perform, in repetition, even the simplest tasks. With this in mind, researchers at the U.S. Naval Research ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- During a recent test at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., the robotic lander prototype, known as Mighty Eagle, performed a hover test flying up to three feet and then translated, or ...

Ten years to the day after the Opportunity rover launched to Mars, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this image of the rover, still toiling away on the surface of Mars. The white dot in the image ...